THE POPE WHO DOESN'T KNOW HIS BIBLE

At this time, the American public is afflicted with papal awe because of Pope Francis' visit to New York, Washington D. C., and Philadelphia. In D. C., the thousands who greeted him were "energetic" and "jubilant," according to MSNBC. 

According to the Pew Research Center, "Pope Francis is scheduled to celebrate Mass on an enormous scale Sunday, with 2 million people expected to gather on a mile-long parkway in downtown Philadelphia. And nearly 1,500 priests and deacons will be on hand to help distribute Holy Communion."

He became the first sitting pope to address Congress on September 24th. In the listening audience were Supreme Court Justices, including one who fell asleep, and the Speaker of the House who appeared to be crying during the Pope's hard to understand and difficult hear talk. (One news outlet reported that many in the audience applauded remarks they couldn't hear and/or understand, even the Pope's remarks they vote and speak against at every opportunity.)

Pope Francis will speak to the United Nations General Assembly on September 25th, and when all is said and done, he will have made 18 speeches in America, 14 of which will be in Spanish.

The crowds in D. C. were comparable to a presidential inauguration. His visit shut down much of downtown Washington.

He will come, he will see, he will conquer.

THE SLAP

All those awe-struck, obsequious sycophants, staring in wide-eyed reverence and listening to a man as if listening to a god, have they no idea that his very presence in America is a slap in the face to the Founders of their nation? Have they no concept that this man is a false teacher? The answer is, "No concept at all."

How is this man slapping our Founders in the face, albeit with a velvet glove? One speech, one partial sentence of nine words show us, words he said on May 9, 2014, in a speech to the world leaders of the United Nations where he called for "the legitimate redistribution of economic benefits by the State." What is that? It's what socialists and Marxists call "wealth redistribution."

THE REDISTRIBUTORS

Who's to do the redistributing? The government, of course. How? "Legitimately," which, being interpreted, means to take it from the rich (by force, of course) and giving it to the poor. To the minds of the unwashed herd, the woefully and willfully ignorant of American history, even the educated and refined, this is "charity." But there are two things wrong with this. The first is that anything taken by force (i. e. taxes) from someone and given to someone else isn't charity because charity, to be charity, must be voluntary.

THE GOVERNMENT ISN'T GOODWILL INDUSTRIES

The second thing wrong with this was pointed out by one of our Founders over 200 years ago when James Madison wrote: "Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government." Madison wasn't a hypocrite; in 1794, when Congress appropriated $15,000 for relief of French refugees who fled from insurrection in San Domingo to Baltimore and Philadelphia, James Madison stood on the floor of the House to object saying, “I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.”

Thomas Jefferson had the same thought: "A wise and frugal government … shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.”

A BIBLE, A BIBLE, WHO'S GOT A BIBLE?

Can the Pope show us a text from the Bible, the book he's supposed to know which would call for "the legitimate redistribution of economic benefits?" Yes, he says that he can and would ask us to turn to Luke 19:1-10 in which we find the account of Jesus' encounter with Zaccheus.

Pope Francis explains the text:

"It is the encounter between Jesus Christ and the rich tax collector Zaccheus, as a result of which Zaccheus made a radical decision of sharing and justice, because his conscience had been awakened by the gaze of Jesus. This same spirit should be at the beginning and end of all political and economic activity. The gaze, often silent, of that part of the human family which is cast off, left behind, ought to awaken the conscience of political and economic agents and lead them to generous and courageous decisions with immediate results, like the decision of Zaccheus. Does this spirit of solidarity and sharing guide all our thoughts and actions?" (From "Vatican Radio," September 5, 2014)

WAIT. SAY WHAT?

One with no papal education, no seminary degree, not even a certificate of perfect Sunday school attendance can read that text and see the fallacy of such a ridiculous explanation--there is no demand from Jesus for Zacchaeus to share his wealth with anyone. There is no command from Christ that the government take money from Zacchaeus and redistribute to the poor. Zacchaeus' radical and good decision was his own, uncommanded, and uncoerced, which came about, not because of being "awakened by the gaze of Jesus," (a vague and confusing choice of words) but because of his trust he placed in Christ alone. Jesus said to him, "Today has salvation come to your house," implying, "It has been here previously.

Pope Francis admits that what Zachaeus did was voluntary later in the address: "Jesus does not ask Zaccheus to change jobs nor does he condemn his financial activity; he simply inspires him to put everything, freely yet immediately and indisputably, at the service of others." But how does he logically jump from a voluntary, uncommanded, and uncoerced action by Zacchaeus to a state- enforced redistribution of wealth? He just does. He's the Pope. Nobody seems to notice the logical fallacy. Deal with it.

GOT ONE MORE TEXT?

Does anybody else have one more proof text for wealth redistribution? Yes, others cite the story of Jesus' feeding the 5,000 with 5 loaves and 2 fish. Wait. What? Somehow that miracle morphs into a command for the state to take from the rich and give to the multitude? Such an explanation is ridiculous prima facie. What Jesus did wasn't to take from the rich. He took nothing. What Jesus did wasn't to tax the rich. He had no power to tax in the eyes of the state. He came to seek and to save, not to tax. What Jesus did didn't involve the existing government. 

DON'T CRY FOR ME, ARGENTINA

Pope Francis is from Argentina, a once-wealthy country now in ruins: "The Argentine government has regularly cycled among grotesquely corrupt elites who cared nothing at all for the poor and socialist governments trying to redress the damage caused by the elites, who would then spend the country into bankruptcy and social disintegration, followed by a military junta that tried to clean up the mess, and that would then reinstall the corrupt elites. This cycle effectively defines Argentina's history." (Mike Konrad, Oct. 22, 2012) 

His economics are socialistic. He was raised that way.

HE DOESN'T KNOW THE BIBLE: ONE MORE EXAMPLE

The millions of people who will see, greet, and listen to Pope Francis will be awe-struck by one who, when he speaks to vast crowds, the leaders of nations, the poor, and the oppressed, has never once presented the gospel to anybody. And that's because he's rejected it, as have all the popes before him. 

How do we know that? From the "Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church" which offers the Roman Catholicism's  teaching on who will be saved and how:

"135. How will Christ judge the living and the dead?

"Christ will judge with the power he has gained as the Redeemer of the world who came to bring salvation to all. The secrets of hearts will be brought to light as well as the conduct of each one toward God and toward his neighbor. Everyone, according to how he has lived, will either be filled with life or damned for eternity. In this way, “the fullness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13) will come about in which “God will be all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28)."

SAY THAT AGAIN

There it is: "Everyone, according to how he has lived, will either be filled with life or damned for eternity." That's works for salvation. In contrast to this Compendium, we have John's gospel saying 99 times that faith alone in Christ alone saves and we have Paul writing, "For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast."(See also, John 3:16 and the entire book of Galatians as well as Romans.)

To paraphrase a famous saying about someone else; "I find the Pope appalling, but Paul appealing."  

THE TWIST

A hundred years ago in the small European country of Moldovia, a democracy at the time, by the vote of the people, a man they trusted assumed the highest office in the land. His background had been in the academic field, one of the country's leading universities provided his chosen career. He was an academic. We assume that academics people aren't exactly alpha males; they're bookish types, those who love nothing more than spending time in the school library.

THE WARNING

But once he assumed the premiership of Moldovia, something happened: he changed. His new power went to his head and because of that, he becomes grist for our study of the sin nature of man.

A little while after assuming his newly-elected role, he powerfully proclaimed, "Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to stand in our way." It sounded ominous, and it was.

THE POWER OF THE THREAT

His administration began its own special brand of propaganda, printing thousands of posters which read, "I am public opinion. All men fear me! If you have money and do not buy government bonds, I will make you wish you had!"

THE POWER OF THE FOUR-MINUTE MEN

Not content with posters, his administration trained 100,000 men to deliver a four-minute speech in town meetings, in restaurants, theaters--any place they could get an audience to spread the premier's  message. Moldovian records indicate that in two years, these "Four-Minute Men" delivered over 7,555,000  speeches in 5,200 communities in praise of their leader.

SUFFER, LITTLE CHILDREN

The administration looked upon the population of the country as children to be manipulated, children who must be taught to put their individual needs second to the needs of the state, sort of an early version of "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." Any citizen of Moldovia who didn't put the needs of the state above his own, they called, "Dead weight."

The regime taught Molovians to sacrifice their food for the good of the state by designating certain days of the week as meatless or wheatless days. And to make sure "the children" toed the line, they sent out volunteers to knock on doors to get their neighbors to sign pledges and oaths to abstain from this or that luxury. One official of the government pointed out that dinner was extravagant. Two meals a day should do nicely.

If the premier considered adults to be children, so he considered children to be children ripe for manipulation--they pressured children were to sign pledges to leave no bit of food on their plates and not to eat between meals. The government made up nursery rhymes for those toddlers too young to read and these poems taught them to be loyal, to condemn cooks who used "wheat where they should have used corn."

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU SAY

The premier banned printing, uttering, writing, or publishing any disloyal or profane or abusive  language about the government. To say anything of which the government did not approve could mean jail time or some other punishment. Such language was not permitted in public and in one's own home. They caught one such man--he had explained why he decided not to buy a Moldovian bond and had done so in his own home. He was brought to trial.

WHO CAN YOU TRUST?

To buttress his regime, the premier approved the creation of "The Protective League" which gave badges to its members which read, "Secret Service." The purpose of the League was to keep watch over their neighbors, co-workers, and friends. Members of the Protective League read their neighbor's mail, listened in on their phone conversations, all with the approval of the government. The organization boasted 100,000 members.

STAND UP!

And woe be to the person who said or did any action deemed disloyal; the mob would take care of him. A man refused to stand for the Moldovian state song while attending a pageant. When the song was over, a furious by-stander shot him in the back three times. The crowd cheered and clapped. Another man refused to stand when he heard the state song played at a sporting event. Angry fans beat him senseless.

In one province of Moldovia, mobs put groups of people who weren't loyal to the government in cattle cars and left them in deserted region without food or water. Another mob lynched a cripple deemed to be disloyal.

THE TWIST

"Thank goodness," we say in America, "It can't happen here." But that's the twist. The events described did happen a hundred years ago, but not in Moldovia. There's no such place as Moldovia. (There's a "Moldova," but no "Moldovia." I just made that up.) The events were real; they really happened. No, not in a mythical country, but in America when Woodrow Wilson, the Princeton academic, was President during WWI. (See "Liberal Fascism," by Goldberg.)

Great power in the hands of any fallen man (that's all of us) leads to just what you've read. This is on any level, even the church, and that's one reason why, in the Bible, we don't find God's setting up an office called "The Pastor," but instead, men, and not just one man, a plurality of men called, "elders" to be the shepherds (plural) of the flock. The number of "super pastors" of churches small and mega- who've turned abusive is legion. Of one such pastor, a member of the board said, "It's either his way or the highway."

I don't know who we'll vote for for president the next time around, but can we trust any fallen man with such power? There's one thing I do know: Psalm 146:3 is true: " Do not trust in princes, in mortal man, in whom there is no salvation."So is Psalm 118:9: "It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in princes.

INFECTION IN THE BLOODSTREAM

People, very brilliant people, got an infection back in 1917. Looking back, it's hard to imagine how they caught it, but catch it they did. And one by one, and in groups, they infected others, many others. This wasn't the horrible influenza epidemic (that occurred in 1918 and killed 70,000 in America and 50-100 million worldwide). The infection of 1917 wasn't physical; a scientist didn't need a microscope or a blood draw to detect it.

What a lot of brilliant people caught was the infection of an satanic idea.

MOTHER RUSSIA

Back then, the world was watching an upheaval in Russia, an ideological earthquake called the Bolshevik Revolution. But the brilliant people weren't just watching it; they were cheering it, falling in love with it, and writing about it. A wave a journalists went to Moscow and saw the revolution as "history on the march in Russia." (Later, Warren Beatty would star in an long, long movie about one of those writers named John Reed. The movie was called, "Reds," released in 1981.) Reed so wanted to convince other brilliant people that something special was going on in Russia that he wrote a book about what he saw and called it, "Ten Days that Shook the World."

TERROR IN THE STREETS

When the Bolsheviks took over, they instituted the Red Terror which was a campaign of mass killings, torture, and systematic oppression. The Bolsheviks set up what all dictatorships must have, a secret police force and estimates range from 50,000 to over one and a half million people were killed in the Red Terror. Yet John Reed, when he stared at the Red Terror, said, "I don't care." (A paraphrase)

Another brilliant person, E. A. Ross, argued that the secret police had killed relatively few people who opposed the new government, so he said that it wasn't a big deal. Yeah, right. Some of the brilliant people were so in love with the Bolshevik Revolution that they denied the Red Terror ever happened. Double yeah, right.

THE BRITS BEDAZZLED

The British were also love-struck. One English author wrote in "The New Republic," "The Bolsheviks stand for rationalism, for a new system of cultivation, for an active ideal of cooperation and social service against superstition, waste, illiteracy, and passive obedience."

Brilliant people like W. E. B. DuBois, John Dewey, and John L. Lewis in America reported that there was new life going on in Russia. To say they were awe-struck is an understatement. They hailed the revolution as the greatest social experiment in history. They praised the heroism of the Bolsheviks and Stalin's experiment. (Stalin's "experiment?"Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the literary giant who wrote about the Soviet gulag system, claimed the true number of Stalin’s victims might have been as high as 60 million!)

To a man, the brilliant people thought that the Bolsheviks were going to lead us, America included, out of the old world and into a new and glorious future. Like I said, the brilliant folks were so in love with the Russian Revolution that many of them traveled to Moscow and its environs, writing love letters about Russia's bold experiment. (Shouldn't we get nervous when a government is going to conduct and "experiment?") Stuart Chase, one of those smart people, wrote that the Soviet Union was the all-caring state and that the Communist Party officials had a burning zeal to create a new heaven and a new earth.

Wait. What?

THERE IT IS: THE INFECTION!

That's it! The infection unmasked! The infection, long loose in the human race, is the innate desire in fallen man to snatch the reins of history from God and bring in the new heaven and the new earth,  apart from Christ.

How could such brilliant people overlook, deny, and cheer the Bolsheviks and what they were doing? It's all because of the infection. The one main symptom of the infection is the idea that anything you do is all right, as long as it leads to the establishment of a new heaven and the new earth apart from Christ. Exterminate thousands, even millions? That's OK as long as it leads to a human-engineered and humanistic millennium.  All of fallen man's plans to bring in heaven on earth apart from Christ's Second Advent bring a blood bath--N. Korea (1.6 million killed by Kim Sung), Red China (60 million killed by Mao Zedong), and Nazi Germany 17 million killed by Hitler) come to mind.

COULDN'T THEY SEE IT?

They were smart people. Couldn't they see it? Several components enter the picture: fallen man is blinded by Satan to the point that as long as he believes man can bring heaven to earth, all is permitted (Line 'em up and shoot them if it'll bring the millennium without Christ), he's willfully ignorant; he's easily fooled.

FOR US

Paul has a word for us about politicians, leaders, authors, journalists, and governments who promise that they or some group or some man or some government will take the reins of history and bring heaven down here to earth: Ephesians 6:11.

HOLLYWOOD AND HER FRIENDS

Hollywood has two friends, the universities, and the media. They're tight, so tight, that when you hear one speaking and then the other, they're saying the same thing. Their thoughts and words carry the same message, so what we hear, we hear over and over and over again.These three friends pretty much control what people see and hear. The question is, "What are these three BFFs talking about?"

Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda expert for the Nazi's said, "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." What if the message of the three amigos is a false one? Then that's what we'll hear, pretty much all the time, and that's what we'll believe.

Let's take an example from Hollywood concerning this unified message of the big three. They make many a movie or a TV program for one purpose: to deliver a message to you and me. Many times this message comes packaged a speech, usually by a leading actor in the movie, and at the end of the show, just so you won't miss it and you'll go home with it. Two examples come to mind.

KNOCK, KNOCK

Hollywood made a movie in 1949, called, "Knock on Any Door," with Humphrey Bogart as a lawyer who's defending someone who killed a policeman during a robbery. The accused insists he's innocent; he comes from a troubled background: after his father was jailed, leaving the family without any income, he fell into petty thievery and wound up in jail repeatedly despite attempts by a social worker and his girlfriend to set him straight.

SPOILER ALERT!

As the plot develops in the courtroom, we at last learn that the accused has been lying to his lawyer (and us) all along: he's as guilty as can be and finally admits it on the stand as he crumbles into a crying mass of humanity under the withering cross-examination of the D. A.

We, the audience, have now been set up for the climactic speech by Humphrey Bogart will deliver the message of the movie as he dramatically and eloquently tells the courtroom that his client didn't kill the policeman, "You did, you and me."

He goes on to deliver the message: his client is more a victim of society than a natural-born killer. He arouses sympathy for the plight of those trapped by birth and circumstance in a dead-end existence. And then comes the reason for the title of the movie as Humphrey Bogart tells us, "Knock on any door in the slums and you'll find somebody just like him."

The message: it's not his fault that he murdered a policeman; blame society.

COMPULSION

In another movie, called "Compulsion," based on the horrific 1924 case in which Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, two brilliant students at the University of Chicago, kidnap a 14-year-old named Bobby Franks, kill him by bludgeoning him with a chisel, and drive to a lake in nearby Indiana where they dumped his body in a culvert. All this in order to show that they're a superior species not bound by any morality. (They read and liked Nietzsche.) At the time, it caused an uproar in America that two college students would do such a thing, just because.

SPOILER ALERT

The movie stars Orson Welles who portrays Clarence Darrow, the lawyer of the two killers. They made the movie to get to Welles' long, way long, and, and, in my opinion, boring speech at the end, by which he saves the two monsters from capital punishment by his eloquence. (In real life, at the trial, the speech took 12 hours.) The long, way long speech delivered in the commanding voice of Orson Welles, is an extended argument against the death penalty based upon Clarence Darrow's view that man has no free will: they couldn’t choose to commit or refrain from crime, but were conditioned completely by their constitutions and environment. So, according to that logic, nobody is accountable for any wrong.

In real life, Darrow's eloquence carried the day. The judge was weeping whenDarrow finished and spared their lives by a sentence of life in prison. 

TODAY

As we're seeing in our society, Hollywood, the universities, and the media want to shut down speech they deem "politically incorrect," (politically incorrect speech is anything they do not approve of, such as any major doctrine of Christianity like the atonement, the deity of Christ, et. al) and they are unanimous in this. And they are powerful. In other words, they want to shut you up. As Stella Moribito has written:

 ". . .political correctness ends up separating people as never before.  PC not only squashes civil discourse, but creates a strange and rigid polarization in society that spawns destructive caricatures of others.  . . . The point of this kind of propaganda is to centralize power by first dividing people, quite often by demonizing those who don’t subscribe to the narrative.  It breaks up personal relationships.  And this allows those wielding power to control who says what to whom, and to dictate who relates to whom.

"People who obey the narrative are allowed to partake of society, while those who don’t subscribe to the narrative end up as 'nonpersons.' Personal relationships are the ultimate source of human power.  Ground zero for functioning relationships is the family unit.  That’s exactly why the family is the prime target for destruction by today’s forces of political correctness."

NOW FOR THE GOOD NEWS

But what Hollywood, the universities, and the media can't control are your private conversations, man-to-man, one-on-one, conversations that carry the pollen of truth, truths like grace, the atonement, the resurrection, faith alone in Christ alone. It is this private sector that all totalitarian governments hate and want to destroy because they can't control it any more than the religious leaders could control the private conversations of Philip and the Ethiopian treasurer or Peter and Cornelius or Paul and Lydia, then Paul and the Philippian jailer, and innumerable others. The power of person to person conversation, like the private nighttime conversation recorded in John 3 which has so echoed down the centuries that we're still listening to it and studying it.

Many of those who study evangelism have written that the day of mass evangelism is over in America; it's by the private, one-on-one conversations about the crucified and risen Christ that the seed is planted, watered, and the harvest comes. Christ commanded those in the churches to get out there and start talking. (The Great Commission) Paul cannot conceive a church that's focused inward.